Biznology Webinar: DIY Digital PR (Online Engagement & Blogger Outreach)

Hi, and welcome to today's Biznology Digital Marketing webinar. I'm Mike Moran, founder of the Biznology blog and a senior strategist at Converseon, a leading social consultancy. I'm also co-author of Search Engine Marketing Inc., sole author of Do It Wrong Quickly, and a former IBM distinguished engineer. Today, you'll be hearing from Chris Abraham of Unison, who will present DIY Digital PR: Online Engagement and Blogger Outreach. But before we hear from Chris, we need to recognize our sponsors. Barnraisers, a digital marketing and social media solutions company that builds brands using community and the proven principles of relationship marketing. Brick Marketing, a full-service SEO solutions company that increases website visitors. Geris Digital, a full-service digital strategy firm that reaches deeper into the conversation than any other agency anywhere. Marketing Pilgrim, the internet and social media marketing news blog. We cut through the bull so you don't have to. And Unison, the unagency, your secret weapon in the noisy world of 21st century brand communications. As we wait for more attendees to join, let me review the format of our webinar. Our Biznology webinars last just 30 minutes, so you can easily fit them into your busy schedule. We record each webinar and we'll email you that link later this week. During our speaker's presentation, you can use your GoToWebinar controls to ask a question. That orange arrow opens and closes your webinar controls. If you have a question, simply type it into the box labeled Questions at any time during the event and press the Send button. I'll select a few questions at the end of our webinar and pose them to Chris. While we're waiting for a few last attendees to join, I'd like to remind you that the Biznology newsletter and blog are available for free at biznology.com. So if you're not already a subscriber, we hope that you'll sign up now. Thanks again to all of you for spending 30 minutes with us. We know how valuable your time is, so let's introduce today's speaker. Chris Abraham is one of the bloggers here at Biznology and Director of Social Media at Unison Agency, an integrated brand agency combining strategic, creative, and technology services to help their clients build and strengthen their brands. He's also the founder and principal at Garris Digital, a full-service digital strategy consulting firm. So if you've ever struggled with how to bring your team up to speed on digital PR best practices, this is the webinar for you. Chris, take it away.

Thank you very much, Mike. I really appreciate the, the fine intro. I only have 30 minutes, so I'm going to be speedy, and I'm not going to go as deeply into the process as I would like. However, I've included a hashtag #DigPR as well as my Twitter handle @ChrisAbraham so that you can continue the conversation, ask me additional questions, ask me to go into more detail, and just generally say hello, and I will follow you back. Digital PR, digital PR is hearts and minds online. It is to me both promotional and protective, brand promotion and brand protection. In today's case, I'm going to be talking about online blogger outreach and engagement. I'm using the term blogger sort of as an overarching to include in many cases forums, listservs, social networks, places like Reddit, such as link sharing aggregators. Video sites like YouTube. But today I'm just going to talk about one campaign I did for Mizuno. There are some things you have to do before you start a campaign. A campaign isn't just outreach. Here is a list of stages that I'm going to be going through during the course of the presentation, pretty much equal to the number of pages in the presentation. You need to know your goal. You need to think before you reach out. You need to find out who the people are who are talking. You need to learn who they are, not only just where they are, because they might be in message boards and you are spending all your time on Facebook. You need to collect them into lists so that you can go ahead and monitor them, and then best engage with them. And of course, you need to connect with them through engagement. You need to pitch them, and then at the end of the day, you need to analyze what you've done for the benefit of adjusting the campaign or looking for success in a larger marketing, integrated marketing strategy. I have a personal digital PR philosophy. The first one is find people where they live. A lot of people go ahead and do the, if I build it, they will come strategy. I don't believe that that's possible in such a competitive environment where beauty is so readily accessible. You need to get off your duff, and you need to go meet people. I also believe that the people that you need to meet aren't just the top 25 people. There are over 800 million active bloggers worldwide. You need to get deeper down and find those people, not only where they live, but you need to engage way deeper than the top 50. To quote my personal Bible, The Cluetrain Manifesto, We want you to take 50 million of us as seriously as you take one reporter from the Wall Street Journal. Spoil everyone no matter how low down the totem pole they are, as if you were kissing up to Guy Kawasaki or Om Malik. And then be grateful, because in a world of earned media nobody is required at all to help you. So what do you want to accomplish? Do you want to just build Brand awareness, when I was writing this list I thought of that Adobe commercial where the guy is getting zapped every time he uses buzzwords. But to be honest, building brand awareness, increasing community engagement, building your portfolio of bloggers or brand ambassadors, driving traffic or membership, conversion volume, search is even legitimate to get a feel for your space. And even your competitors, or for the traditional role of PR which is to launch a new product/service, or to announce an investment, or a new employee, or something really cool happening. First thing you are going to do is you've got to listen before you leap, look before you leap. When it comes down to it, a lot of people are obsessed with tools, the perfect tool. The perfect tool is not necessarily the most expensive tool. In many cases, although it is going to be I think sunsetted if that is the word, Google Alerts is a very viable tool. Just search Google for Google Alerts and it will search the interwebs as well as the social webs. And it will let you know what is going on real-time, or as you need it, or via RSS. Secondly, just Google search. Get a feel around. But in order to make that worthwhile, dig more than just 10. Go down 5, 10, 15 pages. Spend some time understanding the space. Spend some time understanding the top bloggers and how they link to each other, what the conversation is happening. Allow your explorations to enter into message boards. Allow everything. Allow your recon to be very fluid. Because you need to go in there as an experimenter and have a thesis of course, or sorry, a theory. But don't allow that theory to dirty what you really find, what your discovery is, your outcome. And then try the tools. All of the tools, most of them allow 30 days free, 15 days free. I use SDL's SM2. But everybody loves Radian6. Sissamos gets top marks. Sprout Social is more entry-level. And Lithium is just full of awesome people, although I've never used the tool. I love everyone there. Okay, and then discovery. Where are they? Where do they live? And how do I connect with them? So you found where the conversations are happening. They are happening deep in Digg, or they are happening in Adventure Riders Forum or whatnot. Who are the participants? Who are the actors? There are a multitude of social networks. And for the Mizuno Mezamashi campaign, Ivan did a lot of messaging in Daily Mile, which is where a lot of beginning runners like to share their their runs, their rides, their swims, etc. So do not, you know, ad hoc discussions are happening everywhere. And just remember that no matter how obscure what you are trying to do PR for, what you are trying to market, or engage with, or communicate about, there is always a blog of it, kind of a variant of Rule 34. I will go into Rule 34 if you are not aware of it later. Because there are upwards of 800 million active blogs worldwide. But I always start with Google. I create these huge lists. My next campaign is 3,400 bloggers, and most of that was just from digging deep, deep, deep, deep into Google using searches like, I don't know, 5K runner blog. 10K Runner Blog, Marathon Blogger, Top Marathon Blogger. Always start with Google. However, there are some amazing tools out there. Brand new tool out there, 2 of them. I know both of the developers. A little tool out of the Pacific Northwest, I believe, called Little Bird out of Portland, getlittlebird.com. It's an amazing tool for discovering influencers and seeing how they relate to each other. Inkybee is an amazing tool, inkybee.com, I-N-K-Y-B-E-E dot com, allows you to pretty much walk you through blogger outreach, discovery, engagement process, pretty cool. Guy Kawasaki's AllTop is pretty useful when it comes to finding bloggers. Technorati Top 100 Blogs, I didn't include that here, and a little company called eCairn, I believe it's from Paris, France, ecairn.com. Very useful tools. Go check them out. I'm sure you can get a try for free. And nobody is paying me for that by the way. Okay, learn. Do they want to be engaged and how? I found Mike Collier when I was trying to find information about this, and I use him twice here. The first one is a lot of top-end bloggers have pages on how to pitch me, and I think it's really important to be aware of that. One important thing is when I collect my 3,400 blogs, I don't reach out to anybody who doesn't make emailing them and knowing their first name really easy. I used to go ahead and go through the NIC, and I used to go and find WHOIS records and be able to find an email address historically on whois.sc and find their email address before they went private. And honestly, when you do that, people feel like you are kind of prizing them, that you are using metadata files from a long time ago that you shouldn't have access to. So if contacting them is hard, maybe they don't want to be. I generally don't follow people's jumping through hoops when it comes to message me on Facebook, or Daily Mile, or LinkedIn, unless they are A-listers, but we will go into that later. And if you are reaching out to forums, you need to not just drop links or not engage in shill conversation without first clearing it with the forum owner or the majordomos of the forum. You need to not jump in there. You need to follow terms of service, and you might even have a great opportunity of being introduced. Bloggers introduce you to their readers. Forum owners introduce you to their forums. And social networks, you need to engage before befriending and before pitching. So if you are not a known entity and people are tweeting you pitches, you are probably not going to respond well unless that offer is super awesome. And you know what, generally offers are not super awesome, although the offer that we had had from Mezamashi was pretty cool. Okay, collect demo geo-psychographic lists. Now we all know what the A-lists are, right? So they are the crème de la crème. They are the Om Maliks. They are the Guy Kawasaki's. They are the Chris Brogan's. They are generally professional bloggers. They will do earned media, but they are expensive. Bring your checkbook. They like to be spoiled. They like to be flown around. They like to be taken to lunch. It's very hands-on, or you need to build a rapport over time, and you need to become their persistent bestie. It's sort of the equivalent of joining their fraternity. You need to get through hazing. And then once you become a reliable source, then there is a parity there. They know to go to you when they need information backdoored through Musuno for example, or OLX, or Sage North America or whatnot. So they will blog for free, but free is not free. They require a lot of hands-on because it is not that they are snobs, they just are really busy and lots of people are pitching them. Many of whom have more news than you do. Then there's the B2D list. I'm not going to go into them very much. They generally start with a rate sheet. They want pay-to-play. They want to get paid if you write a blog post about digital PR being earned media. They say things like, PR companies are compensated. Why aren't bloggers? Do you expect bloggers to work for free? And they say things like, I can't support myself on advertising alone. That's fine. If any blogger reaches out to me and says they want money, I will pull them aside and give them to the advertising section of the organization. But then I also put them in the do not contact list forever. I put them generally into the bulk email outreaches I do that include the E through Z list. This is the long tail. Rule 34 is if it exists, there is porn of it, but the same goes for the blogosphere. You might be willing to chase them down via their LinkedIn or Facebook Messenger, but there are so many of them that I only engage them if they have their email address available gladly. Otherwise, they don't want to be contacted. And they don't want to be your best friend. They don't need a long-term relationship. They will take your content gladly. And what I say is the E-Z list has never been kissed. They've started their blog hoping that at some point they'll get a Kelly Hermès bag. Don't ask me why I know that particular bag. But they'll think one day if they start a style blog, they'll get something. But nobody ever reaches that down, so they are pretty grateful and they are pretty happy, especially if you are nice to them. Like I said back here, spoil everyone like you would Guy Kawasaki. So here is a list for example. I just use spreadsheets, so I don't have this huge database-backed kind of thing. If you will see, not every first name was available, but every email was. I have the name of their blog. I have the URL of their blog. It is pretty simple. And then we will have multiple universes, and we will combine them, and we will send out an email. Here is an email on the right, an example of the email that we created for the Mizuno campaign, the Mizumashi campaign. That is verbatim. That is the one that we used. You will see there is some mail merge. Hi first name, readers of blog name. I'm not going to read that out for you. You can read that. But pitching is speed dating. Long tail blogging is speed dating. You do not need to overwrite. All you need to do is make people intrigued, because less is more. People have limited attention spans. You need to premasticate message, that little birdie kind of feeding its little baby with premasticated regurgitation. Into easy-to-understand pablum, not because people are idiots which most people think, but because people are busy and they need to be distracted, compelled, and they need the little light bulb to go off immediately. And don't attach inline content or attachments, especially if it is graphics. You need to go ahead and put the content somewhere people can steal it from that is web-based. And do not BS, kiss butt, or whatever. To quote Mac Collier again, or Collier, Mac Collier, please do not say you read and love my blog, then pitch me on something that I never cover here. Do not BS. Oh, I love you so much. Only say that if you mean it. The lines don't work. People are cynical, libertarian people online. You know that. You guys, all of you guys are, sure. The outreach, catch is the more important part, even more important than the pitch. On the right there you can click through to MizunoRunningNews.com. This is the social media news release. Everything is pre-masticated, pre-linked, pre-embedded, everything is there. There is a share bar, even though in the beginning we were like, well, why would we put a share bar there? People are just going to share instead of blogging. Truth is, Is if they only share, they only were going to share. I'd rather get the message out. God bless them. But if you go to this mizunorunningnews.com, you can scroll down. It's just informational. Don't limit the SMNR to just the pitch. If you scroll down, it goes into the whole world of Mizuno, about Mizuno, about the different types of shoes, well beyond the Mezamashi Project. Give them options. I consider it like to be a big box store, and this is only a coupon for a big screen TV. I want them to get to the big box store and spend that $800. If they don't like the TV, I want them to spend it on something else. Steal me, steal me. Optimize the content to be copied and pasted, pre-embed codes, and optimize for SEO. All right, here are some examples of the inbox getting flooded. Crash, tons and tons of email replies. First thing you have to know is that not everybody is going to say yes. Another thing you've got to know is that you've got to man the inbox vigorously. And what is it? You need to be vigilant, and you need to be really charming, be really nice. So you need to get to this inbox right away. You need to go ahead and reply to everybody saying, be kind, for everybody I meet is fighting a hard battle. Analyze. At the end of the day, after everybody replies, after everybody blogs and tweets and so forth, you need to collect this information. You need to prove impact. Make sure that before you put the SMNR up that you include Google Analytics tracking code in the SMNR, that you have it in your target site as well. For example, Mezamashi or whatever, brilliantrun.com. Make sure that if you have access to AWStats or Webalyzer on your server side, track both, everything. In terms of media mention tools, I use SM2. It allows me to historically find content. The upper right bar graph is Graph. Is from SM2. It shows the dates of the outreach and the resulting volume below. Below that is Google Analytics. And if you have some sort of affiliate trick of the trade, or if you have some cool version of affiliate marketing or even retargeting code, use that. The proof is in the pudding. Lots and lots of mentions, lots and lots of blog posts. Tons of blog posts. You can go back in this. I put this up on slideshare.net/chrisabraham. You can take a slower look. Remember, when people blog, it influences a lot of other conversation. You can see that lots and lots of these bloggers influence lots and lots of other conversation. And don't forget, final words, hugs not horns, that's my quote, and be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. Back to Mike.

Thanks, Chris. We all have a much better idea of how to help our PR teams adjust to the digital world, but you didn't answer every question. I've got a few teed up for you from the audience, and I'd like to remind our audience that it's not too late to ask your own question by typing it into the questions box in your GoToWebinar controls. So before we get to the questions, I'd like to remind you that the Biznology team provides jumpstart workshops for corporations who want to apply what they learn directly to their own business and have their team create a plan for executive approval right in the workshop. Chris and I teach the Digital Public Relations course, and you can see it explained on your screen here, and we'll be there to guide you and help you persuade your executive to say yes. So if you're interested in this, go to biznology.com/training for more information on this and all of our JumpStart workshops. We also need to thank our sponsors once again. Barnraisers, a digital marketing and social media solutions company that builds brands using community and the proven principles of relationship marketing. Brick Marketing, full-service SEO solutions company that increases website visitors. Geris Digital, full-service digital strategy firm that reaches deeper into the conversation than any other agency anywhere. Marketing Pilgrim, the internet and social media marketing news blog. We cut through the bull so you don't have to. And Unison, the unagency, your secret weapon in the noisy world of 21st century brand communications. Now on to your questions. Here's the first question. Loved your advice, Chris, but how do I know who is B, C, or D list versus the E to Z list?

Good question. You can generally find them by their clout, I guess, is a short answer. You can easily— it's sort of cream and milk. You can easily scoop the cream off the top. You can find the cream easily on sites such as Technorati Top 100 and AllTop. Any semblance of real strong branding, you can pretty much tell by their professionalism, but you can more likely tell from their clout or their reputation in the market. Tools like eCairn and the other tools will also give you a ranking of them. It's harder to find the long tail. The long tail people generally blog more like back in 2006. They share information about their personal experiences. They are less grandiloquent, and they are much more personable. I don't know. I've never been asked that question before. Let me think about that and write about it next week, Tuesday's blog post on Biznology Blog.

That's great, Chris. Next question, how can you find the key blogger for a particular industry? In my case, financial services.

There are a lot of questions about whether B2B is a viable conversation. However, today I'm going to be doing a blogger— or tomorrow I'm going to be doing a blogger outreach, for example, for Sage North America. And they are pretty awesome, but in many cases they might believe that there is not going to be a blogosphere interest in in accountancy software. Just remember rule 34, Internet rule 34, that there are people talking about these things all the time. That's why I use Google to do the searches. Do searches based on the keywords that you are interested in engaging in followed by the word blog. Then you will be able to find the conversations that people are having about products and services that you have. I think that that's more valuable necessarily than only finding the content based on searching for financial services bloggers. Another reason is because some more generalist bloggers tend to blog about all types of other things. And if you only focus on financial service area bloggers, or business bloggers, or VC bloggers, then you might miss some very worthwhile crossover bloggers. I hope that answered your question. Otherwise, please tweet me and I'll go into it further.

Next question, I have a small business. Big bloggers don't care about my products. How do I find the time to do outreach with all these little bloggers who might pay attention to me?

Well, this is a good opportunity. If you're not going to be doing a big brand launch, I mean, I go through this every day. I moved to Berlin, then I moved to to Portland, and I moved back to DC, and none of my fellow blogger/social media/influencer friends knew where I was living or knew about me anymore. You will have the benefit of the long game. You will be able to become blog besties. So make a point of participating. Even before you tweet, try to find a list of the people who might be best birds of a feather, to flock together and make a point of becoming comment contributors. I don't know about you, Mike, but commenting on blogs isn't very common anymore. And so I get— to use a technical term— I get wiggly when people contribute. I would also recommend maybe going ahead and starting to do a very gentle blog, a very casual blog, maybe a Tumblr, maybe something on Blogger yourself so that you can become a co- content marketer so that you can engage with these fellow bloggers through attraction as well as engagement. And if I haven't answered your full question, please tweet me and I'd be happy to go into it further.

I think that was a great answer, Chris. And just to your point, there are 2 current bloggers on the Biznology blog that I invited to start blogging because of the comments that they were leaving. They were so good that I'm like, why don't we just have these people writing blog posts? And so I absolutely agree with you, Chris, that writing your own stuff and getting some attention for it, and then finding out who comments for you, those are going to be very interesting ways of identifying who the people are that you will be able to influence and do outreach to. So that's all the time we have for today. And Chris, I really want to thank you for these great ideas. And I also want to especially thank our audience for their participation and questions. If you had a question that we didn't get to, didn't have time to answer, you can email your questions to eileen@mikemorangroup.com, and she'll be sure to give them to Chris for the answer. Later this week, we'll send you all a link to the recording of the webinar to listen to again and to share with others. We also invite you to mark your calendars for our next Biznology webinar, 12 Myths vs. Realities of Search Engine Optimization with Rob Peterson, scheduled for 11 AM US Eastern Time on September 24th. Thanks, everybody.